Copium Addicts: What "misinformation" is actually usually about
People use misinformation to maintain beliefs more often than change them
This image is currently the focus of right-wing Twitter, which has become convinced that it is a production of AI:
Here is a list of things that have been said about this photo:
The picture is fake because people are holding signs backwards
The picture is fake because what is displayed on the phones is different for each person
The picture is fake because Air Force Two has four windows in the front not five.
The picture is fake because there are no tail numbers on the plane
The picture is fake because there is a patch of “green grass” in the center
The picture is fake because they never would have let people in this area for security reasons
To many of the tens of thousands of people retweeting these claims and many of the people consuming them, these are not simply potential problems with the photo, but also evidence of how stupid their opponents are, that they would believe such a picture could exist at all.
As I’ve said elsewhere, it can be hard to prove beyond any doubt a random photo is real, but you can show that the evidence the photo is supposedly fake is without merit. Consider the following rebuttals for each claim.
The picture is fake because people are holding signs backwards (signs are printed on both sides)
The picture is fake because what is displayed on the phones is different for each person (people are in different positions trying to get a shot above the crowd)
The picture is fake because Air Force Two has seven windows in the front not five (Air Force Two can be any plane used by the VP, but the most common one has five windows)
The picture is fake because there are no tail numbers on the plane (recent policy changes have removed serial numbers from Air Force Two)
The picture is fake because there is a patch of “green grass” in the center (It’s apparently a guy’s shirt?)
The picture is fake because they never would have let people in this area for security reasons (hangar rallies are pretty common, Donald Trump has used them too)
This is exhausting of course, and the easier thing is to realize that the claim at stake here is the crowd size, not the photo. The question is whether this photo is good evidence of the size of the crowd. And the strongest answer is that it doesn’t need to be. Even if this photo was manipulated, there are hundreds, maybe even thousands of other photos and videos, many from journalists, that show not only a similar crowd size but all the same elements of this photo. The photo here is evidence, but it is also one element on a pile of overwhelming evidence that the crowd was very large and very energized. Focusing on this single photo is a bit beside the point.
But back to the attempts to use this photo to claim the event was small, unattended, or fictional. This behavior is not limited to the right, of course. At the same time many on the right were examining Harris rally footage like the Zapruder film, many on the left were circulating images of what looked like a mostly empty Trump rally in Bozeman, Montana to advance the claim that Trump’s campaign is falling apart. A good portion of that “evidence” of Trump’s collapse consisted of videos from very early in the event before the venue had filled up — which of course is no evidence at all.
And that brings me to my main point.
Mountains of ink and millions of research dollars have been spent on the idea that misinformation is primarily used as persuasion — to generate belief change. Most lab work in the area of belief designs experiments that show people misinformation (or corrections) and then sees if their beliefs have changed. But as I noted back in November 2016, the primary use of “misinformation” is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
In other words, it’s copium. And you see that here. The presidential race has suddenly changed, and a deep-seated belief of many on the right is under attack. Faced with multiple photos that show their current worldview is wrong, at least in part, those on the right viewing them have four options:
Change beliefs
Reject the evidence that challenges their worldview
Provide counter evidence that supports their worldview
Say that evidence doesn’t matter, they know what they know
Number one is hard, and we — as humans — don’t do it much, and we don’t want to do it. We’ll go to amazing lengths to avoid it.
Number four is perhaps the more honest way to go. Own up that you position is vibes-based, so you can be shown a dozen photos like this and you won’t believe it. But that comes with some social approbation. We’re not supposed to be biased, and when we advance beliefs publicly, we are expected to supply reasons we believe those, and address the reasons that others advance against our position. To be thought unreasonable — someone driven by animal impulse, or choosing beliefs because of their convenience to one — is seen as a sort of social death, a person that is a nonparticipant in civic discourse.
So people — all people — gravitate to the middle options. As evidence-foragers we go out and gather material to fortify our position, and to counteract any new information that might call our beliefs into doubt.
“Ah,” say many researchers, “then misinformation doesn’t matter at all. People view misinformation, and the net effect on belief is zero.”
There are so many ways this is wrong — not least in that misinformation is used to mobilize, to advance legal arguments, to do things and get things done. But in this context I’d like to make a broader point. Misinformation — in this form of misrepresented evidence — is bad because it allows us all the ease of not changing our views when that is merited.
Take my opinion here. To me, it looks like the race has changed — it seems there is truly something happening on the left right now, much of it organic, and real, and the expression of deep sentiment. And at the same time, Trump seems still incredibly popular with his base.
But I may be wrong. Or I could be right now, and cling to these beliefs after things change. I’ve done similar in the past. We all have.
What saves me — what hopefully keeps me honest with myself — is that I have to provide reasons for what I believe and have to address the reasons of others. It’s not perfect — we hold our beliefs in the face of counter-evidence for very long periods of time. We are horribly biased individuals. But as the evidence mounts against our position it becomes increasingly time-consuming to maintain. As an ex-smoker, I know this well. I’ve lived it in big ways. But I’ve lived it in small ways too, as we all have.
And these small ways add up. Crowd size may seem a stupid fixation, for instance. But if you look at the beliefs of many election deniers you’ll find that “crowds as evidence” is a core part of the belief system. And I don’t mean it “shows up sometimes” — I mean it’s core. It’s a fundamental pillar on which the entire argument is built. Election denial on the right is proposed as the answer to a series of “obvious” questions, questions like “How could Donald Trump have lost when Biden’s crowds were so small and Trump’s so big?”
There’s many reasons why crowd size isn’t particularly good evidence of overall electoral support — and why it especially wasn’t in 2020. Crowd size isn’t nothing, it’s definitely some evidence of support. But it’s hardly a direct line to election outcomes.
But to the person consuming 2020’s never-ending stream of daily, uncontextualized copium that Biden’s popularity was obviously fake and Trump’s was overwhelmingly real — that Biden’s campaign was not only failing in 2020, but failing in historically unprecedented ways — the Biden win felt not only unlikely, but impossible. People could have come to terms with the closeness of the election over time, leading up to the election, and shift their broader beliefs. Instead, they were thrown into the deep end of the pool on election day. Predictable things followed.
Does misinformation mostly reinforce what we already believe? Of course. But that doesn’t mean it’s any less harmful. A democratic republic requires discourse environments that prompt people to be honest with themselves, and soften beliefs that lack strong unidirectional evidence, or let go of beliefs that become indefensible over time. Discourse environments flooded with cheap fabricated or misrepresented evidence allow us to maintain or intensify our beliefs cheaply. And whether that’s copium or something else, it holds us all back from our potential as critical — and self-critical — thinkers, undermining the sense-making benefits that public discourse is meant to provide.